Trakr, a German shepherd that with his handler was one of the first to arrive and begin searching for survivors on September 12, 2001 at the site of the World Trade Center is the winner of the Golden Clone Giveaway, a competition that sought the most cone-worthy dog. Presented with 5 puppies named Trust, Valor, Prodigy, Solace and Deja Vu one of which is an “exact replica of Trakr” according to Trakr’s owner and handler, former Canadian police officer James Symington said.

Trakr is now dead, so his clones will pick up where he left off.

Symington says that Trust is an exact replica of Trakr. “The physical similarities are uncanny,” he told AFP. “He’s the spitting image of the Trakr that I first met in 1995. He has exactly the same markings, the way he moves, everything. Very alert, very intelligent and intuitive.”

BioArts boss Lou Hawthorne said dog cloning, at about $144,000 per clone, would remain beyond the reach of ordinary pet lovers. But that won’t and hasn’t stopped those with the means from seeking to recreate a beloved companion.

Cloning is a controversial topic in the US as it challenges religious beliefs on many different fronts. Despite the fact that cloning isn’t truly a way to raise the dead, it may be possible one day to use ancestry dna to recreate an Abraham Lincoln .

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I don’t know about the rest of you, but I am sick of hearing about GM/Chrysler bailouts and how Congress now is putting pressure on these two to not close factories or dealerships in the districts of certain members of Congress.

I was afraid something like this might happen when the government got involved in that.

I’m not particuarly thrilled that so many of my tax dollars are going to bail out companies that ignored the writing on the wall for so long that they got into this financial mess in the first place, but now politicians need to leave them the heck alone so they can get their houses in order and get back to profitability so they can repay those tax dollars as soon as possible.

Mr. Frank as leader of the Senate Finance Committee is one of the worst offenders. I’m truly sorry that they wanted to close a plant in your district Mr Frank, and perhaps 80 or 90 jobs wouldn’t make that big a difference to the company overall, but when you multiply that times the 535 members of Congress all hitting up the automakers with similar demands (and yes, I know you say you made a request, but THEY knew and WE know what it really was) then they will never dig out of the hole they are in. And did you ever stop to think that way MORE than 80 or 90 people who may or may not be in your district will suffer because this just perpetuates the negative news that keeps the stock market down. People who are depending on their 401K funds to live on…people who even work for that plant.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow that any jobs have to be lost in order for the automakers to get back in the black, but it’s a fact of life and we might as well take the medicine and get it over with. Retrain those people for work in other industries and get the economy growing again to accommodate them.  Your antics are benefiting no one in the long run and are  just muddying the waters of economic recovery.

This country can’t afford your pork barrel politics Mr. Frank.

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Related articles by Zemanta

• Adding insult to injury, GM will import cars from China (dailyfinance.com)
• GM Continues to Shed Jobs (shoppingblog.com)

I’ve been using this theme for over a year now.  It doesn’t look like the same theme the author created, but nearly 90% of it is all his work, so I’ve left his links intact and hope you will too if you decide to use this theme. It’s a very versatile theme that is easily customized. You don’t even have to know a lot of php to do it.

Upgrade Error

When I upgraded to WP2.8 the first thing I noticed was that I lost my categories. It took a bit of research on my part to discover how to fix the issue, but all-in-all, this was a very easy fix. I see from the author’s website that others are having the same issue, so I wanted to post the fix for it.

You must go into your theme header and footer files to effect the correction. It’s very easy to do from your Wordpress dashboard. Simply click Appearance, then choose editor. When that window opens, you will see a list of files to the right and you will want to choose the Header file first.

The coding for the Header file will be displayed in the editor window and you want to look for the line about 2/3 of the way down that reads:

<?php wp_list_categories(’exclude=1&orderby=order&show_count=0&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

All you have to do is change the word “order” after the = sign to “name” (no quote marks though)
So your resulting code will read:

<?php wp_list_categories(’exclude=1&orderby=name&show_count=0&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

Now do the same thing in the footer file. It’s exactly the same code, so you can just copy and paste it from here. Make sure you do not have any trailing spaces after that > sign or you’ll get another error.

Threaded Comments

Have you noticed that my blog uses threaded comments? Would you also like to employ this on your blog as well? No plug-in was necessary! Changing to threaded comments was not hard to do and the complete instructions are provided by my good friend Lyndi over at Nice2all .

Appearance Changes

You’ll note that I made some changes to the appearance. I removed the logo image at the top and replaced all the images with those of my own.

The logo image removal required a bit of tweaking to the Header.php file (that file AGAIN!).  All I did was comment out the call for the image in the division called “logo”.

So my code reads:

<div class=”top-header”>
<div id=”logo”><!– taking this out for now to see how it looks
<a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”>
<img src=”<?php bloginfo(’stylesheet_directory’); ?>/images/logo.gif” alt=”logo”/></a>–>
</div>

And by doing that, it removed the header image and scooched the entire page up which gives my readers a bit more of my content to see at the outset.

Changing the images was by far the easiest change to effect in the template. I began by downloading the files from the site, then exported all the files within. I opened the folder titled “images” and proceeded to create my own based on the sizes of the theme images. I replaced each image with my own image of the same size and used exactly the same name and image format. I then re-zipped the file and named it VersatilityLiteCustom and installed it to my theme directory. It worked perfectly straight out of the box.

I also tweaked the size of the side bar and post areas as I wanted more post area but still wanted a side bar that accomodated two 125×125 ad boxes without crowding. This change required my going back to that editor pane in the dashboard and opening the stylesheet. css file (it’s the default file that opens when you select the editor, so you should be there anyway).

I changed the side bar from 339 px to 275 px in the following code:

#sidebar-contain{
	float:right;
	padding: 0px;
	width:275px;
	padding:0 0 0 12px;
	overflow:hidden;
}

Then in the main content section, I increased the size of the content pane from 519 to 575.

That code is changed to :

#content{
	float:left;
	padding: 0px;
	width: 575px;
	padding: 0 15px 0 15px;
	overflow:hidden;
}

The last change I made to the theme involved fonts and colors. Those are also done on the stylesheet and simple search and replace does the bulk of the work there.

Conclusion

So now you know all my little secrets (well except the one that involves Fenphedra) and can now incorporate them on your own version of Versatility Lite. Good luck and good coding!

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Google Trends provides a list of the top most searched on terms in the last 24 hours.

Today’s terms unsurprisingly have Mr. Letterman paired with Sarah Palin and her daughters once more. Maybe this time his apology for the appalling joke he made at their expense will ring true. His first was totally lacking in sincerity.

Topmost search term however is “Statue of Liberty garment” — I don’t really see much returned on that, so the fact that it’s #1 on the list is puzzling. Maybe it’s a term for some paper assigned to a class somewhere.

Other personalities in the search are Joe Buck and Artie Lange. Apparently, Mr. Lange hijacked Mr. Buck’s television show opener. I’ve never heard of either person….does that make me comedy deficient?

Also unsurprisingly are searches for Father’s Day gifts (guys, take a hint from me and give him a golf vacation at the Westgate!). This coming Sunday is the day, you know….

There seems to also be several searches on Zicam and Zicam side effects and Zicam recall. If you’re taking Zicam, you may want to check into the latest news concerning this drug. Apparently some versions of it permanently kill you sense of smell!! And if they don’t kill your sense of smell, they leave you sniffling. Not fun!

Lastly, but not leastly are the searches on the various world soccer team match-ups. Sadly the US lost to Italy in a demeaning 3-1 trouncing.

Now the most interesting term in the top ten is Buzkashi – you might remember a scene from a James Bond movie that had the men playing this game. This traditional game is apparently being put aside in favor of skateboard ing in Kabul. Guess it’s getting to be too hard to find goats and horses.

Til next time.

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